Portraits in White is a collection of three short stories set during the White Terror in Taiwan. Each story focuses on a an ordinary person during this time period. Their lives are all quite different, but the looming presence of the KMT is felt in all three.

As someone who is not particularly familiar with this period of history, story three was especially interesting. I really enjoyed reading about the resistance movement of the Taiwanese diaspora.

The introduction, translator's note, and author's note are all indispensable to the reading experience of this collection. The introduction and translator's note provide some background context for major events during the White Terror. The author's note includes an explanation of why certain things are left vague or without context in the stories. The author explains that readers who aren't familiar with the events should be able to relate to and understand the characters without a ton of historical context and that readers who are interested in the history will look into it on their own. This is my favorite type of of translated work. The author trusts the reader to understand the work without holding their hand through every specific detail.

Thank you to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Definitely a difficult read, but one that's worth it. You need to read the authors note etc. otherwise if you don't already have knowledge about the time of the "white terror" in Taiwan, you will not completely understand what is going on. We get to read 3 short stories about people who live through that time, about their loss, their fight to survive and as much as one wishes for them for things to get better, the book has a rather melancholic touch to it as it is a piece of history.

I hundred percent recommend it, as I think it's important to learn about history of other places, but I have to say that I do need to learn more about that period of time to fully grasp everything.

It's well written and portrayed.

Thank you for this ARC!

I think this collection of 3 stories from the "white terror" period in Taiwanese history was very interesting, but not an easy read. If you don't read the introduction with historical context and translators notes, I think a lot of things are difficult to understand for a non-local reader. I have read a lot of Chinese fiction in translation and there were still a lot of parts I didn't quite understand without the historical context at the beginning.

Overall, some parts of certain stories were interesting but I had a difficult time picking it up because it didn't hold my interest as much as I hoped. Wen-hui's story was the easiest to follow.

I found Kaori Lai's Portraits in White to be a very difficult read, though not without its rewards. It is divided into three stories of Taiwanese individuals whose lives unfold against the backdrop of the White Terror in the mid- to late-20th century.

Portraits in White is clearly not written with an uninformed English-language audience in mind. It spends zero time explaining the political backdrop to the stories' events, forcing readers not educated in Taiwanese history (including me) to go searching for this information in order to understand it. Personally I find this to be a point in the book's favour: in addition to prompting me to learn about a history on which I was not educated, it called me to examine the privilege of assuming such things will be explained to me as a white, English-speaking, Europe-based reader.

The three stories examine different facets of experience among the generation of Taiwanese born a bit before the Second World War. The first follows Ch'ing-chih as he attends school and university, serves in the military, and becomes a teacher. Ch'ing-chih's story deals most directly with Taiwanese politics, given that his work in the military is dictated by the regime and responds to changes in Taiwan's geopolitical situation. Ch'ing-chih's story is set chronologically across four decades.

The second story follows Wen-hui, an older woman who spent most of her life working in domestic service. Wen-hui's is the shortest by far. It mentions politics the least, and yet we see clearly how the White Terror has shaped her life, family, and experiences. Wen-hui's story also engages the most with family life, as her children, grandchildren, and the children she raised while working interact with her while her health declines.

The third and final story is that of Casey, who emigrates from Taiwan to Europe - first France and then Germany. Casey becomes involved in the Taiwanese diasporic community and watches her homeland shift from a distance.

The most difficult part of Portraits in White was, for me, keeping track of the many different characters. Within each of the stories, there are just so many people, and I struggled a lot to remember who was who. They are often introduced only briefly, and many reappear in later scenes without reminders of who they are. This is exacerbated by the book's relationship to time: each of the stories blends an ongoing storyline with memory. Ch'ing-chih's story was the most difficult in this respect, as the ongoing narrative moves forward in chunks of a decade or so, and then the memories unfold within each time, filling in the gaps in between. I understood the choice but found it jarring. We also get relatively little insight into Ch'ing-chih's thoughts, emotions, and relationships. On a positive note, though, I quite liked how this story wove poetry through as a recurring theme, and as something to which Ch'ing-chih continually returns as he ages.

Wen-hui's story is the simplest to follow by virtue of being shorter and being set in a single timeline. The memories also flow largely chronologically, which helped me orient myself in the story. I also found her story to be the most interesting: it is a fairly quiet tale of a quiet, working-class life, and the influence of politics is much subtler.

Casey's story is also set in a single timeline (which I worked out to be around 2005, though I could be very wrong) with memories interwoven. Casey's slips frequently between narrative present and memory and introduces new characters quite suddenly, which I found tricky. This final story had the potential to be the most interesting, by virtue of examining the White Terror via the emigrant experience and exploring the complex feelings of watching your homeland change from a distance. As an immigrant myself, I found this very compelling. My main struggle with Casey's story was that it simply felt too long; it felt like it had made all its points by about the halfway mark and then began to feel repetitive. In the second half, it also began to make its points less subtly, which was unfortunate as subtlety is one of the book's strengths.

I've been fortunate to read several Chinese-language ARCs this year (all courtesy of Columbia University Press) and one of the most interesting facets to me has been the use of different variations of Chinese, which is very difficult to translate. As pointed out in the translators' note, Lai shifts between Mandarin (the more standardized version of the language) and Taiwanese, with the latter being mainly used in conversation among characters. There is no straightforward way to translate this, but I appreciate the work Lai is doing around the use and politics of language, and the translators' work to make readers aware of this.

Finally, there are three different additional sections of the book beyond the three stories: an introduction by James Lin, which provides some explanatory notes about the socio-historical context of the stories; a note from translators Sylvia Li-Chun Lin and Howard Goldblatt, which remarks on key translation choices and approaches; and an author's afterword from Kaori Lai, which presents a more personal discussion of the stories and why Lai chose to write them. I found all three of these very helpful in better understanding the book. I would personally have preferred to have the author's note at the book's beginning; Lai doesn't provide a great deal of explanation for the stories, but the way she situates them in Taiwanese history is very helpful, and it really drew the three very different stories together for me in a useful way. I would also have preferred for Lin's introduction to be an afterword; I read it after finishing the stories and liked it as a way of providing further explanation and pointing out things I had missed.

Portraits in White is a book that really makes you work for it. It was a difficult read because of this, and not always my favourite; but I appreciate the ways in which it pushed me out of my comfort zone and encouraged me to learn about a portion of world history of which I was not previously aware.

I came into this book not expecting much beyond the synopsis, but what I found in these novellas was incredibly complex and fascinating. They focus on three ordinary people who lived through tremendous change in Taiwanese history, but have something different each to show for it in addition to witnessing how rapidly the world (and Taiwan) is changing around them. I enjoyed the second and third novellas more than the third, as it focuses on two women, but the first novella is just as important as the other two for creating a holistic picture of the period. Highly recommend this one if you're into character studies, Taiwanese history, or books set during this time in general.

A book that follows three different stories all set during the KMT military regime in Taiwan. The introduction really paints the portrait of what was going on in Taiwan during this time and then the stories starkly portray the reality of living through this occupation. A thoroughly important read that everyone should read.

Kaori Lai’s Portraits in White is a collection of three novellas of ordinary Taiwanese people who lived through the White Terror period - the period of martial law imposed by the KMT in 1949 and lasting until the late 80s.

This is primarily a history work, and I recommend it to people interested in this period of Taiwanese history, or in the limiting of consciousness that occurs under authoritarian rule. Though none of the subjects is particularly lucky, each still makes choices they need to survive - learning new languages, joining the army, losing track of old friends. The book is imbued with a sense of loss - mostly, of the lives these people could have led.

I particularly liked 1. The analogy drawn in Casey’s story with the Iron Curtain and cross-straight relations 2. Wen-hui’s broken and messy family that still came together for her and 3. Ch’ing-chih’s journey with poetry.

This shares the choppy and distant prose style of other Mandarin-translated works I’ve read, and I wish this particular work could have avoided it. There are a lot of characters in each novella and I did have a hard time tracking who was who and which were important. Even though this was very interesting, the two issues above limited the emotional impact.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.